December 7, 2020
2,982 words (~14 minutes)
Tags:
fallacies
Advocating a belief by finding some number of supporting examples and listing them is fallacious. The reason this practice is a fallacy is that the examples are selected because they illustrate the belief and contradictory cases are ignored. In this article, this fallacy is explored by way of contingency tables used in a thought experiment in which two variables are claimed to be associated, illustrating the lack of information gleaned from such a practice in a straightforward and quantitative way.
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